Wabi-sabi is a Nature based Aesthetic Paradigm that Restores a Measure of Sanity and Proportion to the Art of Living

Reading through all of the books I can find on wabi-sabi, one writer speaks out to me as distinct. Leonard Koren. His thesis is what holds him apart. He seems to be saying that wabi-sabi, the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete, is going extinct. So what does this mean for beauty?

I know these few following things are true. Beauty is at the heart of life's purpose. Art tries to capture the essence of beauty, but lets it fly. Wild things, once abundant, are on the decline, which is the worse misery to me. It is impossible to be wild and not beautiful.

Koren's exact words are “the extinction of a beauty”. He goes on to compare a tea hut that he comes across to a big white plastic umbrella.

I agree with Koren. I agree wabi-sabi is perishing, as paradoxical as it sounds for impermanence to go extinct. I guess it can die in plastic. I guess beauty can die when parking lots pave over beautiful fields and rivers burn with pollution.

And children? Children house in themselves the essence of wabi-sabi too. It fades when screens beacon with their video games, perhaps. wabi-sabi is in each child the original authenticity, the magic we see and know.

My life is so imperfect I am perhaps the best person who can possibly lecture you on wabi-sabi. I seek a way out of the big white plastic umbrella. I live in a place where the jobs all seem to create cogs for umbrella factories, from childhood, creative spelling is misspelling. From adulthood the idea is that your whole day must be filled, 40 hours, with work making big white plastic umbrellas, drilling in Native lands for the fossil fuels to manufacture them, or marketing them abroad, or even synthesizing them into edible products. Maybe you are the manager in the greatest store of all, the one where wabi-sabi is some dumb stick in the parking lot, carted off before (gasp) a child sees its exposure, its imperfect beauty.

So then I was in a class in college and the professor was making a point that actually went entirely over my head. But I do remember he showed pictures of images of patterns from Walmart and compared them with traditional Appalachian “crafts” and asked us to rate them on a numeric scale and my numbers kept being outliers. All the other students in the class rated Walmart's patters so high and though the Appalachian crafts were cutesy to them, they would probably prefer the Walmart.

Wabi-sabi is a nature based aesthetic paradigm that restores a measure of sanity and proportion to the art of living. Koren said wabi-sabi is an uncharacteristic feature of Japanese beauty close to the English word “rustic” with a definition “simple, artless, and unsophisticated or earthy, and unpretentious. Broken down, sabi means chill, lean or withered and wabi refers to the misery of living alone in nature away from society and suggests discouraged, dispirited emotional state. Today wabi means sabi in Japanese and visa versa. Koren eloquently uses words to describe a wabi-sabi scene: “mournful quarks and caws of sea gulls and crows forlorn bellowing of foghorns. Wails of ambulance sirens echoing through the city.”